The former principal organist of Grace Cathedral, Susan Jane Matthews presents the first recording of the cathedral's Æolian-Skinner organ in more than ten years. With a program of well-known English, French, and American works, Matthews demonstrates the wide variety of sounds possible from this landmark instrument, set in the acoustics of one of America's most grand, neo-Gothic spaces.

"Subtitled “A recital honoring noble melody,” the familiar compositions do just that, played on a magnificent instrument in a building with resounding reverberation time. Susan Jane Matthews is director of music at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Burlingame, California. She has served as director of music at St. Michael’s Episcopal Cathedral, Boise, Idaho, and as principal organist of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. During her four-year-tenure at Grace Cathedral, she recorded frequently with the Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Matthews completed a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College (Haverford, PA), and Mmus and DMA at the Eastman School of Music as a student of David Higgs. It is worth the price of admission to hear the excellent playing of the admittedly “raucous” Sortie in E-flat of Lefébure-Wély—it is almost jazzy in style and great fun. Susan Jane Matthew’s own arrangement of Herbert Howells’s Chosen Tune is very effective and would be suitable for use as a voluntary on many occasions. The recording concludes with a splendid performance of Jeanne Demessieux’s complicated Te Deum, said to have been inspired by the State Trumpet in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is a very fine recording."

Dr. Matthews turns in a brilliant performance of Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 3, which also demonstrates the clarity of the organ’s contrapuntal capabilities, expertly captured in the rolling acoustic. Her performance of the Demessieux Te Deum is stunning. Dr. Matthew’s compelling, eminently satisfying performances demonstrate her thorough command of technique, musicianship and instrument. This is a worthy document of a proud, noble instrument, which stands as one of the earliest and finest examples of Harrison’s “American Classic” ideal.

The American Organist

Roger Sherman and Bill levey have produced commendable sound and balance.

—Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians

Charles Huddleston Heaton

The Diapason, June 2009

It is worth the price of admission to hear the excellent playing of the admittedly “raucous” Sortie in E-flat of Lefébure-Wély—it is almost jazzy in style and great fun. Susan Jane Matthew’s own arrangement of Gerbert Howells’s Chosen Tune is very effective and would be suitable for use as a voluntary on many occasions. The recording concludes with a splendid performance of Jeanne Demessieux’s complicated Te Deum, said to have been inspired by the State Trumpet in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is a very fine recording.

Charles Huddleston Heaton

The Diapason, June 2009

from the Dean of Grace Cathedral . . .

Music, like architecture, is the essence of a great cathedral. It takes a long time to build such a magnificent space and silence is as much a part of it as its “columns” and “arches.”

The practice of any craft is a kind of meticulous cultivation. Like the making of a perfume from hundreds of flowers, so music plumbs the depths of human experience and invites listeners to enter places in the heart unexplored and long-neglected.

Great works of music are inclusive, and they are also a manifestation of a creative and painstaking ordering that offers a welcome contrast to our chaotic lives. One of the best images of this characteristic of music can be seen in the inventions of Johann Sebastian Bach. His inventions are an apt analogy for how the basic themes of our lives are ever prone to endless variation: inverted, augmented, diminished, while striving for beautiful harmony. All this is part of the great work of music in our lives.

Some years ago, the theologian Karl Barth wrote a letter to Mozart—a great pattern maker—thanking him for re-ordering and enlarging the world.

My dear Mozart:

What I thank you for is simply this: Whenever I listen to you, I am transported to the threshold of a world which in sunlight and storm, by day and by night, is a good and ordered world. Then, as a human being of the twentieth century, I always find myself blessed with courage (not arrogance), with tempo (not exaggerated tempo), with purity (not wearisome purity), with peace (not slothful peace). With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short one can live.

When you listen to this magnificent music from the great organ of Grace Cathedral, you will discover something of how its perfume triggers memory, healing and refreshing the soul.

The Very Reverend Alan Jones, Dean

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Program Notes

DupréCortège et Litanie

During his 37-year tenure as organist of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, his 28-year stint as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatory, and years of frequent European and American concert tours, Dupré’s masterful interpretations and extraordinary improvisations drew many to the music of the pipe organ. Throughout his 28-year stint as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatory, Dupré had a profound influence on subsequent generations of French organists. His students included such luminaries as Olivier Messiaen, Jean Langlais, Jehan Alain, Marie-Claire Alain, Jeanne Demessieux, Pierre Cochereau, Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, and Jean Guillou.

Dupré first composed Cortège et Litanie as one of five pieces of incidental music for small orchestra, publishing it in 1922 as one of four works for piano . He later transcribed it for organ, and then for organ and orchestra. The latter premiered at the John Wanamaker Store of New York City.

Balbastre: Romance

As organist of the church of St. Roch in Paris, Claude Bénigne Balbastre improvised organ verses in alternatim with the choir in varied styles including minuets, fugues, imitations, hunting pieces and jigs. His compositions likewise reflect a light-heartedness and flamboyancy embraced by French organists in the late-eighteenth century. The Benedictine monk Dom Bedos preserved Balbastre’s charming Romance in the fourth volume of his 1778 treatise “The Art of the Organ Builder” where the composition appears in cylinder organ notation, revealing performance practices of the period.

Elgar: Nimrod (from Enigma Variations) arranged by William H. Harris

Premiered in London in 1899, Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations include a theme and fourteen variations, each variation alluding to various friends of the composer. The ninth variation, named for the mythical hunter Nimrod, pays tribute to August Jaeger, whose surname means “hunter.” A close friend of Elgar’s, Jaeger selflessly championed Elgar’s music at the publishing firm Novello and Company when it was little known beyond his rural Worcester.

Lefébure-Wely: Sortie in E-flat

A contemporary of César Franck, Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wely was the most popular French organist of his day. He most likely improvised this raucous Sortie (or “exit”) as a postlude at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, where he held the post of organist from 1863 until his death in 1870.

Barber: Adagio for Strings

The second movement of Barber’s String Quartet of 1936 has been widely transcribed, including a string orchestra version first conducted by Toscanini in 1938, a choral setting of the Agnus Dei by the composer, and William Strickland’s arrangement for organ. The Adagio—withits luscious, heart-wrenching chords—has been performed at such solemn occasions as Roosevelt’s commemorative service in 1945 and the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco in 1982.

Walton: Crown Imperial: A Coronation March

Arranged for organ by Herbert Murrill, this march by Walton was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation for the coronation of George VI on May 9, 1937, and was first performed on that day in Westminster Abbey by the Coronation Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult. A quotation from the medieval poet William Dunbar heads the score of Crown Imperial – ‘In beawtie beryng the crone imperiall’ - from the poem In honour of the City of London which Walton was setting for the 1937 Leeds festival.

Howells: “Chosen” Tune from Three Pieces for Violin and Piano arranged by Susan Jane Matthews

Howells composed this beautiful melody in celebration of his engagement to the singer Dorothy Dawe who was a native of Churchdown, colloquially known as “Chosen.” At their wedding, the organist George Thalben Ball improvised a fantasy that incorporated the groom’s tune. Howells later published a setting of the piece for violin and piano from which this rendition for solo organ is arranged by the performer.

At last closing an interregnum in major organ composition following the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750, Mendelssohn’s Six Sonatas for Organ appeared in print in London, Leipzig, Milan, and Paris in September 1845. Following a most noble processional march, Mendelssohn weaves the somber tune of Martin Luther’s great chorale Aus tiefer Not (a paraphrase of Psalm 130 : From deepest woe I cry to thee) into the inner fugal sections of the first movement of Sonata 3. The march returns triumphantly in response. The ensuing movement bespeaks a quiet calm.

Cocker: Tuba Tune

This unabashed tune by Norman Cocker, once organist of Manchester Cathedral in England, allows the tuba mirabilis of the solo division, and the crowning tuba major, the newest rank of the Alexander Memorial organ, the chance to sing forth.

Evocative of the dramatic terrain of the islands off the west coast of Scotland, this composition evolved from an improvisation on three Celtic folk tunes by Paul Halley, member of the Paul Winter Consort and former organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Demessieux: Te Deum Opus 11 (1958)

Born in 1921 in Montpellier, France, Jeanne Demessieux served as organist of the Eglise du Saint-Espritin Paris from 1933 until 1962 when she assumed the organist post at the Eglise de la Madeleinein Paris, where Saint-Saëns and Fauré were among her predecessors. In over 700 recitals, Demessieux dazzled audiences in Europe and the United States with her brilliant improvisations, eccentric interpretations, and prodigious technique which she managed shod in her legendary silver Louis XV heels. The second of Demessieux’s three American tours concluded in 1955 with a recital at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. The fiery state trumpet of the cathedral’s organ inspired Demessieux to compose this dramatic setting of the Te Deum in which the great trinitarian hymn of thanksgiving is declaimed upon the organ’s most noble rank of pipes.